Streamlined Emergency Alerting and Communication

Challenges Faced

Santa Barbara Unified School District has 17 different schools located at 20 different sites due to their programming. In addition to the challenges of communicating amongst all their sites, each school had their own unique emergency plan.

In order to streamline safety communication and emergency response, the school district wanted to standardize their emergency plans and provide a better way to communicate and send emergency alerts within individual school buildings and across the entire district as well.

Safety Success

Kelly Moore, Safety Coordinator for Santa Barbara Unified School District informed that the district was able to use CrisisGo for a district-wide school safety drill for The Great ShakeOut, an annual international earthquake safety drill event.

According to Moore, they used CrisisGo to send out a drop, cover, and hold alert followed by an evacuation alert, and they concluded the drill by utilizing a digital roster event to allow the staff to account for their students. Moore said that they were able to send the drill alerts out to 863 people throughout the district.

"Really, the important part was all the administrators, our safety teams, and the managers of our groups were all notified. That was a huge, huge thing, and really the success of the drill itself was knowing that we had that capability," stated Moore.

Plans for the Future

Moore said that as they continue to improve school safety and build out their use of CrisisGo, he would like to see a standardization of the methods for emergency response across his county. In addition to working with other school districts within the county, he would also like to include law enforcement and fire department agencies for streamline emergency communication and response.

According to Moore, there are 108 different schools that comprise the 20 school districts in his county, and there are 5 different law enforcement and fire department agencies. He said that having all the districts on the same page for emergency response would help save time in an emergency and help streamline the response efforts of first responders. Moore stated, "That's a huge thing when you're talking about trying to get our hands wrapped around a crisis and starting to manage a crisis."